The Scent of Snow
by orangeflavor
Summary: "You will not join her," he breathes decidedly in the space between them. The space that is slowly closing. This is him not pretending anymore." - Hyuuga Hinata and Uchiha Sasuke. Just outside their windowsill, heartbreak still hangs heavy.


Disclaimer: I own nothing, I make no money.

Author's Note: Written for SasuhinaRW18 week on tumblr.

 _:: Wasuremono: forgotten or lost things; an item left behind somewhere or forgotten at home ::_

The Scent of Snow

" _You will not join her," he breathes decidedly in the space between them. The space that is slowly closing. This is him not pretending anymore."_ \- Hyuuga Hinata and Uchiha Sasuke. Just outside their windowsill, heartbreak still hangs heavy.

Hinata doesn't close her windows in winter.

"You can smell the snow, you know," she says, fingers curling around her tea cup, nose red and runny. She sniffles, staring down into her cup. She swirls the tea slowly, grazing the cup's edge with every rock of her wrists, but never really going over.

"You can't smell snow, Hinata." He frowns at her across the table.

She doesn't lift her gaze. "Maybe _you_ can't," she teases. And then she sneezes.

Sasuke leans over and pulls the blanket draping her closer around her neck. It's a pointless thing to argue, anyway.

She sneezes again.

"You're being impractical."

Her swirling stops.

"It smells like Hanabi's kimonos," she whispers suddenly. "Like her hands." Hinata's brows furrow. "Like her kunais."

Sasuke watches her from across the table. He doesn't imagine he'll ever be able to understand what it is to have a sister.

Even more so, what it is to have a dead one.

But he still leaves his window open that night.

(Itachi never smelled of snow anyway.)

* * *

Some days, Sasuke is sure it is Hanabi that Hiashi sees when he is looking at Hinata. Not because he wants to, he's sure, or at least, mostly sure (because in a way, Hiashi's always been looking for Hanabi in her sister).

These are the days Hinata's hands curl beneath the table and she bows just deep enough to shade her gaze from view.

It's useless, in the end.

The ghost of her grief is as apparent as her departing footsteps in the silence.

Just before they leave the room, Sasuke glances back to see Hiashi's hand sliding over his face.

* * *

He distracts her easily enough with training, and with the missions he doesn't even need to bother asking Tsunade to assign them (if only to keep her focused, keep her steady, keep her moving).

And maybe she lets the kunais cut a little too close now. And maybe she doesn't jab at her opponent's tenketsu quite so accurately. And maybe that Hyuuga blindspot has widened just a bit – _a lot_.

(Hanabi has always been her blindspot, he sees this now, especially when she doesn't.)

And maybe he'd have let her bury herself in this grief if he hadn't been irrevocably in love with her already –

If he hadn't been fast enough to catch the enemy nin's shuriken half an inch from imbedding itself in her neck.

Her eyes blink wildly up at him, coarse like sea foam (and he sees now how she has been crashing against the shore all this while – too abruptly and too often to submit to the dull reprieve that drowning would grant).

Later that night, when she is pinned to a tree, his hands gripping her shoulders, his stare fixed to that still-unmarked throat (and yes, he has distracted her in other ways as well but not this night), he runs a thumb along her pulse point and pretends not to feel the shiver that rocks her.

"You will not join her," he breathes decidedly in the space between them. The space that is slowly closing.

She blinks once. Twice. Swallows thickly.

This is him not pretending anymore.

She nods. "Okay." The tears are fresh (they have been too often he thinks). "Okay," Hinata affirms.

When he kisses her he only asks that she believe it.

* * *

Sasuke figures if you empty your heart out too often it stops aching for fullness.

He never tells Naruto these thoughts, because…God, what a mess that'd be.

But Hinata –

He breathes it in the hollow of her throat, in the crook of her elbow, in the valley of her breasts, in the space between her lips –

(Like a warning.)

But she takes it as a plea and she would be right – though she never tells him so.

* * *

"Do you still miss him?" she asks one day.

It doesn't take mentioning who 'he' is exactly. It has always been Itachi. It always _will_ be Itachi.

"Sometimes," Sasuke answers.

"Does it get any easier?" Her words are muffled in her sweater, her nose pressed into the arms she keeps crossed atop her knees.

He thinks about lying to her. And honestly, he's sure it would save each of them a whole lifetime of pain, and probably a bit of false hope, and most definitely time wasted wanting that which will never return (he wastes enough time yearning, he's not looking to add to it).

In the end, it comes down to this:

"Time makes everything easier, even when you wish it wasn't."

Because even in time he has forgotten the sour tang of blood that had soaked into the wood doors of his home, and the sharp pain of Orochimaru's mark at his shoulder, and even his brother's eyes in the end, those haunted red – black – _grey_ eyes –

(Grey so dark you could mistake them for black any other day but this, this day he dies – this day he presses his bloodied fingers to his little brother's forehead and smiles like he knows, like he fucking _knows_ – and he does, oh how Itachi does –

That time is greyer still.)

"Someday in the future, when you least expect it, you're going to wake up and realize you've lived your life just fine without her."

She blinks up at him, a furrow lining her brow, anger in her cheeks – red (but not grey). "Is that supposed to be comforting?"

Sasuke sighs, looking up at the sky. "It's supposed to be the truth. Take it for what you will."

He hopes she does. He hopes beyond anything else that she just – _simply_ – takes it.

Hinata opens her mouth as though to speak, stops, thinks better of it, curls her fingers tighter into her sweater.

The truth is he's lived just fine without Itachi.

He just never really wanted to.

* * *

He drags her to Naruto's birthday celebration. She ends up with cake on her nose. He ends up licking it off, in the corner of the room, away from prying eyes, but close enough to the crowd to send a flush of red up her neck.

He misses this.

But more than that, when she presses her hand to his chest and leans in, he knows she misses this, too.

* * *

Sasuke tells her not to go, but prying Hinata from that stubborn clan loyalty of hers is quite like trying to pry ramen from Naruto he finds, except with more disappointed stares and less yelling and _God_ sometimes he wished for the yelling instead.

At least then he wouldn't be on the receiving end of that cold stare, that stare that reminds him he could never take the _Hyuuga_ from _Hinata_ (even if some nights he lays awake staring at the ceiling imagining it) and he wouldn't have to watch the curtain of her silken hair slip over her shoulder when she turns from him, her hands held primly together, shoulders back, and he wouldn't have to hear the reproach in her voice when she tells him –

"They are my clan, Sasuke. I must go to them."

 _You wouldn't understand_ , she doesn't say, but he hears it all the same. And it just makes him so _angry_ to watch her walk from his house in her best kimono, trailing her footsteps toward the Hyuuga compound beneath a winter moon, never once looking back.

If she would only look back.

In the end, he still accompanies her to the Hyuuga banquet, in his best montsuki, the Uchiha crest proudly displayed along his back. Sometime through the night he makes his way to the garden and stands along the short bridge with his elbows on the rail, dropping tiny stones into the pond beneath him.

He senses her approach well before she reaches for his hand, entwining his fingers in hers, forehead pressing against his sleeve as she exhales into the cold night.

"You need to know that I didn't come for them," she says into his sleeve, hands trembling over his. "I came for her."

Sasuke doesn't look at her, his bones still singing in righteous anger (or maybe just righteous pity, he cannot tell with her sometimes).

"Hanabi loved this clan." The sudden threat of tears lines her voice and then Sasuke cannot stop himself from glancing down at her. She looks up at him and smiles sadly. "So I will love them in her place."

And suddenly it isn't anger anymore. It's the sharpest, vilest brand of guilt he's ever felt. He takes her by the arms and pulls her into him, cradling her head against his shoulder. "I'm sorry, Hinata. God, I'm so fucking sorry."

"It doesn't matter," she mumbles into him, fingers reaching up to grasp at the silk of his robe. "It doesn't matter because you still came."

Some days it's she who teaches him how to rightfully love the dead.

* * *

When she is ready, he accompanies her to the cemetery. They visit Neji first, because this is practiced pain for her, and the familiarity helps to dull the ache.

Sasuke lights the incense for Hanabi though, because Hinata is too cold and too still and too jagged at all her edges (all the edges that mattered, the ones her little sister used to soothe but not anymore, not anymore because she was –)

Hinata brings her hands together across her lap and bows low, holds it a moment, and then raises back up, perhaps a little too swiftly to be considered proper, but she has little mind for grace or etiquette at the moment, and when she feels the break, the rupture, the shattering just beneath her skin, she bows once more, before Sasuke can watch her in her ruin.

If he sees the tears falling to the grass behind the length of her dark hair, he doesn't say anything.

When they leave the cemetery, Hinata stops just at the gate, a hand at his sleeve, as though she has suddenly remembered something.

Something she shouldn't have forgotten.

She looks pained when she stares up at him, and before he can open his mouth to speak she is already whispering, as though the air it took to say the words was sacred –

"We should light incense for Itachi."

Sasuke thinks perhaps this is their curse: they can never stop lighting the incense.

For their families, for their teammates, and perhaps even in the future, for each other.

But in the meantime, Sasuke is determined to love no less for it.

He cups her chin and stares at her a moment, swallowing down that thick slice of unease, that knowledge that full hearts always break harder than empty ones and _even still_ –

He is already too full of her to turn back now.

Leaning forward, Sasuke presses his lips to hers, and the whimper that escapes her is half-grief, half-abandon – somewhere in between he thinks he even hears relief. She opens up to him easily, perhaps too easily, but he doesn't question the salt taste of her tears when she melds herself to him, and he doesn't question the curl of her fists in his shirt, and when he winds his hands into her hair, he doesn't question how kissing Hyuuga Hinata amidst a field of graves ever came to be (because if anything in this life makes any sense, he's sure it's that, and maybe that's the point of it all).

But there is too much incense to burn, and by nightfall, they run out of matches.

* * *

"I think Hanabi would have liked you," she says one day, over the rim of her teacup.

Sasuke thinks it's perhaps the worst and best thing he's ever heard.

Worst, because he hopes beyond reason that it were true.

And best, because _he hopes beyond reason that it were true._

(They will never truly know and maybe that's how it should be, he thinks.)

* * *

Konoha's festivals have always been bright and loud and thrumming with excitement. Tonight is no different. Hinata and Sasuke walk through the streets hand in hand, following the boisterous pair of Naruto and Sakura as they go from stall to stall, painted lanterns lighting their way, casting orange slants of light across her light pink yukata and Sasuke thinks she has never looked more beautiful than in this moment, this night when she smiles at Shino and Kiba, her free hand lighting atop Akamaru's head, her hair pinned up, her cheeks dusted a warm pink and nothing – _nothing_ – has ever felt so transient before. So temporary.

It is the same smile he sees in his dreams most nights but Sasuke has learned to recognize the fleeting and the lasting. He has learned the arc of her lips by heart (if not by taste), and these days he does not trust its permanence.

So when the night has ended and their friends have gone their ways and he turns to lead her home along that dark, light-less alley, he stills in surprise at the way she winds her hands around his waist and presses her cheek to his back.

They stand there breathing for several moments, his hands limp along his sides, her breath pooling between his shoulder blades.

"I'm happy," she says, and he blinks in blinding confusion into the dead night.

(There are no lanterns to light this path.)

"I'm _happy_ ," she says again, a breathless, disbelieving chuckle lighting her voice.

Sasuke narrows his eyes into the dark, his body tense, every molecule beneath his skin quaking in keen disquiet.

Hinata laughs. Right there into the fabric of his yukata, her breath warm along his back, and she's shaking, and there's a touch of delirium to it, and then – and then she's _crying_ , so swiftly and so abruptly he's sure he's misheard it.

"Do you think she could forgive me?" she asks between sobs.

And there is no mishearing that.

They stand like that far longing than he thinks he should let them, with her crying into his back, and his hands bunched into fists at his side (the half-moons his nails cut into his palms don't hurt nearly as much as they should and if he lingers too long on it, he wonders if the pain won't simply…ebb away – but then, he has never known pain to do such, not in this life, or any other, he's sure, and he's also sure that Hinata knows this too, knows this deep down in her marrow, in her veins, in that pulsing, bleeding mess of a heart he dares to call his – even if only because his own has been lost for years now).

What makes him turn into her arms is not, as he likes to think, because of any yearning to comfort her.

What he cannot tell her is that he asks himself the same question most days.

"There is nothing to forgive," be breathes into her hair, clutching her to him, and he doesn't know whether he says it more for her or more for himself.

But she is laughing again, and then crying again, and he wonders if perhaps this is just their tragedy in two acts.

He will take his happiness where he can.

(There is no Act Three.)

* * *

The rain stops them along their way to Sakura's, but Sasuke doesn't mind. They sit in the window of the tea shop as Hinata draws words in the fogged up glass and he runs his fingers through her hair.

It is, perhaps, not the kind of love he had once wanted.

And yet, it has been so long since he's remembered wanting anything but her in the first place.

Sasuke joins her in her glass drawings and she smiles back at him, his fingers still in her hair, the rain still pelting outside.

(It is, perhaps, the only kind of love he'll ever want again.)

* * *

Sometimes, Hinata still keeps her windows open in winter; it is, after all, warmest where the light gets in. But mostly, she remembers to latch them closed. Mostly, she leaves her grief forgotten along the ledge.

Mostly, she has stopped trying to discern the scent of snow.

She has learned, instead, to simply let it fall.


End file.
